


That Ocean Carries Everyone

by ModernAgeSomniari



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dark, F/M, M/M, Maybe - Freeform, Spoilers, canon divergent - probably, yet hopeful?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:00:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25359571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ModernAgeSomniari/pseuds/ModernAgeSomniari
Summary: Solas walks the library in the Crossroads and contemplates reality and shadows.  He also tries desperately not to see what the library might be showing him.  If he sees, then perhaps she was right all along.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas, Iron Bull/Dorian Pavus, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	That Ocean Carries Everyone

He walked the Vir Dirthara.

The ancient library was as it ever had been since he had destroyed it; fragmented and heart breaking. The Archivists that hung in the air taunted him with their ruin, their pitiful attempts to please, to be what they had always meant to be.

He deserved every twist of white-hot guilt that churned in his gut. He walked this place to feel these things, to remind himself of what he had done, to remind himself of what he had to do. How could he leave this place the way it was - broken pieces of masonry slavishly responding to whoever was lucky or foolish enough to come across how they were stitched together? How could he not do everything in his power to heal it, no matter the cost? Surely it was no greater than what had already had been paid.

As he walked a broken path between packed shelves of books that no longer held pages, he took a breath to steady himself. He could not lie to himself, not now. If he was to do what he had set out to do, he must do it with his mind and eyes open. Do not shirk from the pain he will cause, do not close his eyes against the suffering of thousands for what he believed to be the right cause. To do so would be to become what he had fought against for Ages. He would not be so.

So he admitted to himself, as a shadow of a child laughed and scampered around a stack of historical tomes, that he came here for solace. For reassurance. If one tempered and honed the mind, one could experience the memories here like they were one’s own (and if he avoided those memories that the Archivists seemed to assume he wanted to see lately, in those places where he had spent the time to paint, to wallow and to agonise, he could not be to blame, not when he had now chosen his path, reaffirmed his purpose). So, as he walked, he opened his heart, freed his soul from where he kept it tightly hidden from the people that followed him outside of the Crossroads. He listened. He needed it today, of all days. The Anchor sat new and restless somewhere just below his breastbone. Her screams still echoed in his ears. At least they drowned out her words.

In front of this array of religious texts sat a scholar, feverishly writing. Opening himself to the echo, Solas himself felt the kindling of the fire of curiosity at what he was discovering. Digging further, he felt the barren ache in his own heart as he left his Bonded bed, his wife cold to his own touch even though he could all but feel the heat of another. His own identity blurred now, he smiled slightly at the gentle warmth of this man’s child in his arms, the boy surprised by his father’s embrace. Could feel, too, the steely core of determination behind this father’s delicate affection - he would not be to his son what his own father had been to him. One life, among many. Who could dare to judge it unimportant?

Around this corner, now sheer into the abyss with the destruction, a young woman. Afraid and alone, but this determination tasted like sulphur and lemons in his mouth - a bitter victory over a mistress who denied her everything. He could reach in and sample from the first moment this girl felt her mother’s wet kiss on her brow, to the pain on her bottom from the last time her mistress had her brother beat her. Another life to add to the weight pressed upon him. Was he being dramatic, putting too much on himself? Another memory, the same girl. Fear, blistering and all-encompassing - the sky was falling in, she had only snuck out for a moment, no one would have noticed only the sky was falling in, this didn’t usually happen did it? Mistress would know what to do, where was she, where was anyone? Anyone? Anyone? Please?

He stayed with this girl (Alleria, was her name) until he could feel the area settle, the Archivist beside him like a maternal parasite, soaking up the girl’s history until she became part of this mutated garden of knowledge. Only when there was nothing left, when the last remaining life of this person was faded into his memory and the memory of the Vir Dirthara, did he move on.

He descended what had used to be a sweeping staircase and moved through an Eluvian to a Nexus. The Librarian here was newly dead, and he had just enough time to marvel at who might have done it before another memory presented itself, one he hadn’t come across before.

It was a shemlen child, dark skinned with lush, black hair. He was weeping, a broken apparatus of some sort in front of him and the dim echoes of quiet, disappointed words ringing around his ears. Solas couldn’t quite tell what the words were saying, but he felt the sharp edge of them like a scalpel at his heart. Another, later, this boy now a man joltingly familiar, raging at the owner of this voice like a tempest, another young man behind him, half-naked and shamefaced. Solas felt his own cheeks heat with sympathetic embarrassment and the feeling was almost enough to replace the shock he felt to his bones at what, at who, he was seeing. Another shift to overwhelming gratitude, as his new friend spoke a elvhen word for a relationship he hadn’t known existed before, another shift that stole his breath and tightened his balls in a rush as he felt silken rope against his wrists and a hot mouth on his chest. Another memory, newer, his gut hardened into rage and fierce protection, fighting against a shapeless horror within this very library and shamelessly putting a face on it just so he could get it out of his system. She needed him to be supportive, not vengeful.

The vision left him with chills spreading over his body from the base of his spine.

Dorian.

Of course he had been here. She had known Solas for who he had been when she arrived, he knew she had been here. So of course they would have been here, too. It explained the dead Librarian - they were one of the few groups of people who would have had the power to defeat one. But he had received the vision like he had received every other vision here. He had seen punctuations in the life of a mere shadow in the same way that he had seen the life of a man who had lived the way this world had always intended to be.

As was his wont of late, a thought occurred just behind his consciousness. A place where thoughts could come and stay without interfering with his own self. A place where they were, if not safe, then contained. He did not think. But he did move.

As he walked to the bookshelves opposite where Dorian had forced an imprint of Solas’ own face on the now dead Librarian, the shelves in front of him melted away to reveal another Eluvian. Finding these secret things was so easy now, the Archivists didn’t even try to stop him. They hadn’t retained enough of themselves to. As he walked, he turned his mind to all the memories he had seen just this one day - how many more were within this library, caught in the moment the Veil fell, beyond where the Veil fell? This was the Vir Dirthara, he could find anyone here, if only their record had survived. For whatever reason he was putting one foot in front of the other in this particular direction, regardless of the knot of ice in his gut and the blazing, barely contained roar of inferno in his heart, nothing could compare with all of these. For whatever he felt now, they had felt. And they were legion.

The place he came to broke his heart, just a little more. It was humble; there were only the splintered remnants of plain wooden boards, the dust settling amongst the cracks. The musty thickness of air filled with too many books filled his lungs. This was the most protected of all the Archives. It was also why the Archivists were so revered and so venerated.

Every book on these shelves hummed. He could hardly bear to see them, ruined as they were. No one entered the library without giving of themselves to knowledge. And Knowledge kept records. If there were memories left in the library it was because they were caught in the liminal space between occurrence and classification. Or they had bled out of the books cracked open like wounds, bleeding the life of whomever they belonged to onto the parched wood and through the fissures into the swirling air of the Vir Dirthara until they landed, to be scooped up by anyone who passed. Row after row, column after column - even if they were damaged beyond repair, there were thousands. He stood for a moment, breathed in dust and paper and life, let his nostrils fill with the stench of ruin, his gut broiling like he had breathed in the raw decay of a long dead corpse.

That place that had germinated the thought that brought him here stirred and no matter how desperately he tried, not even he could control his own senses. Far down along the seemingly endless wall of books was a harsh end, a cut off from where he had severed all ties between this place and anything truly living. Only, where there should be nothing but a tattered, frayed edge of reality, were four new books. They pulsed with life, garish in their colouring, warped and different in shape and size from any of the others. But they were there.

He was paralysed with indecision, caught with his mind pinned between what he must be and this place where the shadows of the last three years dwelt. And howled.

If he turned his head he would see them fully. If he saw them fully then he would have to see them within their context - as part of this library, broken as it was. Their lives, their memories, their reality sitting nestled in amongst those that came before like they belonged there. 

But if they belonged there, if they were part of this ocean of life and love and pain, then that would mean things that he could not admit. At least, not that he could admit and do what needed to be done.

On the other hand, if he didn’t turn his head, then he would not see them. And if he decided he did not see them, then he was deciding to ignore reality in order to make his own selfish choices easier. He had fought for so long, so very, very long…

He closed his eyes. He breathed. He squared his shoulders.

He turned away.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It was Bull the next time. A hard woman with a heart of wool, that picked up the blocks he had just knocked down, laughing in her joy and pride morphed into larger man, soft around his belly, but his words were like knives in his own mind, rummaging around and slicing at any soft tissue he found until there was nothing but purpose. How ironic that the only man sitting alone at this bar was a Vint. How soft his hands, hard like diamonds his words. How fragile his heart. Fuck but why did she have to be so damn tiny - hard as a rock in his britches as the dragon above him roared and he heard her yell right back, this could almost be better than sex. Certainty, obvious enough to make him weep when the bitch offered him a choice, because time was relative here and Solas felt the bone-numbing realisation of parallel Bull had made between the two of them before the Vidassala had ever dared offer him the deal. He shied away then and pretended he hadn’t. Fled from the floating feeling of unwanted freedom as Bull and he watched the ship blow, heard the triumphant cries of the men that were only supposed to be his in name. 

The thought chased him through the library until he had stepped out of the Eluvian to the unsettlingly reverent gaze of his people.

Until those men had become more real than the ship.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Varric took him in the middle of watching a pair of scholars make their slow, tantalising way to a tryst between the stacks, fuelled by mutual academic passion. One moment he was watching them dance shyly around each other and the next it was the woman from Kirkwall and the mage he didn’t like to think about too much for all that he had accidentally come too close to truths this world couldn’t uncover unless…unless…

Only then it was Fenris and Varric was helpless, watching this doomed triad stumble their way towards an inevitable messy end and hoping against hope that the lack of contact he’d had from them all recently meant they were somehow all right. The weight of feeling in the man was almost too much to bear and yet, perhaps because the last few weeks had not been easy and he had not slept for days, he stood there and took it. Perhaps, if he accepted enough pain from these shadows of shadows (the four new books lurked restlessly in the back of his mind) he wouldn’t see the fourth. Let him not see the fourth. Desperate as he was, he watched Varric bid farewell to his beloved again. And again. And again. It became almost atavistic, he revelled in the echoed heartbreak until he felt dirty and petty. Then he left.

He didn’t come back for a very, very long time. He told himself it was because the war kept him too busy. He certainly didn’t listen to the part of him that told him, brutal in its honesty, that his reluctance to come to this place now was the same reluctance that stopped him from wanting to sleep, to risk that brief couple of moments before oblivion where every ghost you had would come to haunt you. As if she didn’t do that every turn he made, every manoeuvre he thought he’d used to outplay her. Every dream he tried to pretend wasn’t real, until he had fallen asleep beside his lieutenant and woken to find her flattered and happy, rubbing up against him because she thought it was for her.

No, he had no intention of coming here again.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The bare wood is harsh against his knees as he lets himself fall. He is hollow, please let him be hollow. The shadows have grown in their place beside his conscious thoughts, pressing against his mind like rabid dogs.

Children. She had used children against him. Seen that there was no chance of evacuation and used the time she’d had to go around every house and bring out the children to play on the green. She’d stood, eyes frightened, fierce and unmoving as she looked straight at where she knew he and his men were preparing for the Fade-Pillar. The Pillar that needed the weakening of the Veil under this village and which needed the bodies of the villagers to take what would come through. He had tried to find another site for it, he had really truly tried. She had raised her head as if she was looking straight at him. And she had dared him to cut the children down as they played.

He doesn’t realize his face is in his hands until his fingers press hard enough into the softness of his eyelids he sees nauseating bursts of colour. The books above him quiver, whatever life is in them shivering in the face of the torment he is confronting them with. He is numb. He must be numb. Something tugs at his consciousness, almost inaudible through the chaos. Even though it has been months, even though within those months has been enough story to fill a stack of its own, the place in his mind where the shadows dwell remembers. He knows, without taking his palms from his face, that this place will have moved in response to his need. Whatever he is trying to desperately to forget is no longer far away at the edge of the bookcase. There are four of them and he knows if he looks up they will be in front of him on the shelf. Within his grasp. It cannot not be his need to have them here. It cannot. 

The fourth book had been the colour of moss in the deep of trees marked by time only in their greatness. If the embossed gold intricacies of pattern looked like anything he’d recognised from Elvhenan, they had morphed in front of his eyes (that had not looked, had definitely, desperately not looked) into something quite unique. Her very own. He sees it in his mind now and he is too tired to make himself decide he hasn’t seen it. His own voice is loud and unrecognisable in his ears. Surely only animals make such a sound.

On the patchy grass of the village green, one of the smaller boys had tried to leap frog another and fallen. An older girl, with dull hair and a gap in her teeth, had come over and taunted him into trying again, carrying him over and then pretending to the other children that he’d done it himself. Solas had seen it so clearly, like an imprint of them on the world that could never be unseen by anyone who had witnessed it. No one would write this moment, but it was etched into his gut deeper and more permanent than any ink.

The time for the Fade-Pillar to be brought down had come. And then it had passed.

He knows he will see moss-green and gold before he looks up. The four books are still acid-bright in their colour. So very, very different from what he knows.

He reaches for them.

**Author's Note:**

> So the absolutely lovely @siberiansprings on Tumblr gave me a prompt for this title, based on the quote from Solas in the conversation below with Cole. Babe, I have no idea whether this is what you had in mind, but it gripped me by the metaphorical balls and wouldn’t let me go until it happened. Thank you, thank you for the prompt!
> 
> There are quite a few nods to canon I've added to actual canon through this story, so I hope it's not confusing!
> 
> Cole: You are quiet, Solas.
> 
> Solas: Unless I have something to say, yes.
> 
> Cole: No, inside. I don't hear your hurt as much. Your song is softer, subtler, not silent but still.
> 
> Solas: How small the pain of one man seems when weighed against the endless depths of memory, of feeling, of existence. That ocean carries everyone. And those of us who learn to see its currents move through life with their fewer ripples.
> 
> Cole: There is pain though, still within you.
> 
> Solas: And I never said that there was not.


End file.
